Book Image

Drupal Multimedia

Book Image

Drupal Multimedia

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)

File Handling


First, let's examine the nuts and bolts of an exciting change right around the corner. A long-time dream of developers and administrators of Drupal is the better support for multimedia in the core. As every excited newcomer to Drupal has quickly learned, there is currently no built-in way to handle even simply adding images to a site. Thus, the need for this book.

This is soon to change. For over a year, there has been an exciting issue in the Drupal project queue titled "Add hook_file and make files into a 1st class Drupal object" (available at http://drupal.org/node/142995). Slated for Drupal 7, this addition will revolutionize media handling for developers by providing a simple hook_file to the mix. This will allow modules to act on changes to the file system so that they can insert their own functions when a file is added, deleted, loaded, and so on.

Why This Is Profound

Files in Drupal have a long history of being the evil step-children of nodes. Until the release of Drupal...